January 05, 2017

The irrelevance of gun control

The irrelevance of gun control

When I was growing up, one of the strongest arguments for gun control was that those countries that had it tended to have lower crime rates. Europe was held up as the ideal – street crime was low and guns were highly restricted (though not as restricted as gun control supporters claimed).

America, the argument went, was violent because of guns. It had nothing to do with the ethnic diversity and far more dynamic nature of American society (with all of its upheavals).

The more guns = more crime argument has been largely discredited over the last 20 years. State after state has reformed concealed carry laws, resulting in far more “guns on the street” and yet violent crime continued to slide (or it did until the outgoing administration managed to foment race riots).

Michigan, for example, reformed its concealed carry law more than 15 years ago, and the number of concealed pistol licensees has climbed six-fold, yet crime continued to decline. In fact, Detroit posted a slight uptick in murders this year, but the overall crime rate fell (including the number of total shootings). The murder rate has fallen by a third since its peak in the 1980s.

If more guns cause more crime, they are underperforming in Detroit.

Meanwhile, Europe has seen a surge in violent crime – much of which goes unreported. Strict gun laws haven’t stopped mass public shootings, but may have been responsible for the new tactic of ramming trucks into crowds.

Let’s face it: dead is dead. It may be amusing to pass the time by imagining the best way to die, but it is little comfort to the family of a murder victim to know that they were run over rather than shot. They should still be alive, and but for violent crime, they would be. The means of execution is irrelevant.

The problem of violence is independent of the means used to achieve it. Where there is a will there is a way, and arguments that guns make massacres easier ignore the obvious truth that guns also are the only way to stop them – that’s why police carry them.

The real issue isn't the means, but rather the people. Stable, settled and mono-ethnic societies simply have less violence than unstable, dynamic and fragmented ones.

Canada and Japan have lower crime not because of gun control, but because their societies are less prone to violence.

The thing is, there are parts of Canada where violent crime is on the rise. Hint: It isn't out in the rural hinterland among fourth-generation inhabitants.

Europeans similarly were able to get by with strict gun laws because Europeans aren't particularly prone to violence. As the migrants have poured in and their stable, settled and ethnically unified societies have been transformed, crime has soared.

The lesson here is not that immigration is always bad, merely that it comes with tradeoffs. Diversity has been portrayed as an unalloyed good, but it isn't. It has both advantages and disadvantages.

Gun control, by contrast, has no advantages but a lot of disadvantages. The ability to effectively defend oneself is not only a basic human right, it is the last check on rising disorder. That is why so many Europeans are taking advantage of whatever items they can get their hands on to defend themselves, whether pepper spray or firearms.

Individual defenselessness cannot logically bring collective safety.

That's the core problem with the logic of gun control and why it continues to fail.